Web writing workshop - University of Otago, April 30

No notes for slide

Most visitors don’t start at the top and work their way through the site navigation. They’re looking for something specific.

And even with 958,000 places to go, they’ll always be doing 1 of 2 things.

FIRST THING THAT PEOPLE MIGHT DO: Consume information, for example course pre-requisites, restrictions, texts, assessment methods, timetables and fees.

SECOND THING PEOPLE MIGHT DO: Interact – do stuff. Complete a task, for example enrolling or calculating how expensive Massey is to attend.

During both interaction and consumption, 2 things are true:
They’d rather be doing something else. They’re in task mode and just want to get something done.
Your job, therefore, is to help people get something done.

Rugby kitten is ridiculously awesome, but she’s not helping you learn about web writing. Bad content breaks the user’s flow.

Good content is not:
Whatever you feel like producing
Whatever your boss wants to tell people
Whatever fills the template
Whatever you can get signed off before 5pm

Good content is content that helps people get stuff done. It tells people stuff they want to know.
But here’s something about telling people stuff they want to know:
They don’t really read that much.

In 2013, Chartbeat looked at things like bounce rates and scroll depth on slate.com. Across the site, how much of a page do people typically get through before they leave?

First spike in graph: No scrolling at all – ‘this is not the article I want’
50th percentile: Around half the page
Right-hand spike: 100% read (beyond that is comments and other post-article stuff). ‘Articles’ that fit on a single screen (eg video) count as fully viewed. People get through photo galleries.

And Slate is home to recreational web-surfing – stuff that people choose to read. So this data shows
a good result.

…Slate wrote this kind of shamed article about what they learned…

…and so did Fast Company, Huffington Post, Digital Trends, The Verge… Basically, everyone had the same way to tell this story. But in 2013 this wasn’t even news.

Jakob Nielson nailed it five years earlier: When people are in task mode, they take in about a quarter of your words.

Neilson’s graphs weren’t as pretty, but on slide 13 note the levelling off at 200-300 words. The rule holds over short and long pages.

What this means for web writers:
Get to the point
Get the important stuff out first
Be brief if you can
Be interesting
Help people find the stuff they’re looking for

People aren’t just reading from the top until they get bored. They’re looking for interesting stuff and skipping the rest.

Going back to Chartbeat’s analysis of Slate, heaps of readers didn’t scroll at all and half didn’t get past halfway. But on slide 14 look at what happened when Chartbeat graphs out the total TIME spent on Slate pages.

The second half of the page, which only the minority of readers even reach, gets more minutes of eyeball time (across all visitors) than anywhere else.

If everyone scrolled down at the same rate, that graph would start red and fade out to blue.
(Note that the top half of the initial view is totally ignored – banner blindness.)

How do people work out where to spend their time on the page?

Eye-tracking tests show us exactly where on pages people actually look. Slide 15 shows an ‘About us’ page, an s-commerce product page, and a Google search result.

There’s a consistent F-shape: People look across the top, down the side (when they bother scrolling), then across where it looks like it might be relevant.

Eyes focus on:
Headings
The first few words of a paragraph
Things designed to stand out, like calls-to-action (links, buttons)
Images (especially faces)

And the first heading tells them whether they’re in the right place.

A QUICK STORY ABOUT HEADINGS

The closest café to my office is in the foyer of the NZI Building. Also in the foyer is this seat. It’s just a park bench, but there’s a piece of paper stuck to it.

‘About this seat…’
Who‘s going to read that? It’s a seat. Who cares? It’s boring, obvious, almost meaningless.

After 8 months, my coffee finally took so long that I resigned myself to reading ‘About this seat…’.

Turns out there’s actually something great about this seat. It’s made out of old toner cartridges! 100% recycled! And there’s more seats like this out there! That’s frickin’ amazing. No more cutting down trees to make park benches – we’ve got trash!

Ugh: ‘About this seat…’. Even the ellipsis (the three dots) just trail off like the writer got bored.

The heading needs to summarise the best bits. Something like THIS SEAT IS MADE OUT OF YOUR RUBBISH.

Anyway, that’s my story about headings. What happens once we know what a page is about, and we decide it’s the page for us?

Good news! Auckland Uni might be able to help relieve migraines!

But who did the research? What sort of research was it? Drug? Genetic? Physiological? New-age healing? How long till there’s a new product I can buy?

This (slide 19) is a chunk off text with no sub-headings. Imagine the F-Shape here – nothing will pull the eye right. It’s difficult to scan read with help from the writer.

Paragraphs already organise ideas, so LABEL them with sub-headings.

News articles are common offenders, but academic departments are guilty as well. AUT’s Law School Dean is making a first impression here, but it’s hard to tell what that impression is. (I had to shrink this page a lot to fit it to a single slide.)

Sub-headings are good. They break the text up into chunks, and label them.

But some work better than others. Waikato’s international scholarships are sub-headed, but it’s hard work for readers.

The sections sound very similar. Two headings are distinguished by fewer than half their words
Every heading starts with the same words. F-shaped skimming down the side of the page isn’t going to help.

A good example from Canterbury: 18 subheadings break up a long page. The information is ‘chunked’, and chunks are labelled. People easily can find the quarter of the page they care about.

Like headings, LINKS are also designed to stand out – e.g. red text.

Remember the bounce rate on Slate (the people who didn’t even scroll)? Chances are that they followed a link they should never have clicked.

Every week The Economist summarises its main stories and links to each main article. Nigeria’s recent election was important enough to lead the ‘Politics this week’ section and have two articles written about it. What are the two different angles in the articles? Which one would I get more out of? I have to click each link “here” link to compare the two. It takes time and effort, and I’m in task mode – time poor, don’t want to have to make an effort.

Do not waste your opportunity, while you have someone’s attention on your link text, to describe what they’ll see if they click it.

Common, lazy link text: ‘Find out more’; ‘More information’

“Click here” is probably the laziest. That phrase has 1.85B Google hits, and the top two are:
‘Don’t use “click here” as link text’ (W3.org, THE internet standards people)
‘Why your links should never say “click here”’ (Smashing Mag)

Examples from Victoria:
The better call to action is already there on the page!

- “scholarship recipients’ adventures” describes the content being linked to (especially after you solve the lazy apostrophe crime)
- “Read student blogs” tells you what you’ll get

By just using those words you improve the link text (and drop your word count).

At Canterbury, ‘Details here’ is baked into the page template for every academic profile. It was probably a quick way to deal with things, but it’s a waste of prominent text.

Professor Jarg Pettigna studies faultlines at Canterbury University. This link text, from a University in a city still recovering from a serious earthquake, makes work that sound uninteresting. Wow.

Canterbury again: hybrid of useful and not useful. The ‘click here’ crime hides the main call to action.

If you’re a post-grad at Auckland you get told to ‘click here’ for multiple calls to action, including the one of the most important thing you’ll do as a post-grad – submit your abstract (except there’s a lazy misspelling).

Here, though, but the ‘click here’ text isn’t even clickable!

Good link text tells you what’s behind the link – what you’re going to get. AUT have nailed it.
- -helps you make a decision.
- saves you time.
- reduces the effort of working out whether to click or not.

No two links sound the same – you don’t need to check to see which one is right.

Back to you, and what you do.

What you write needs to work for people in task mode.
It needs to get people interested enough to start looking down the page.
It needs to work for skim reading and F-shaped browsing.
It needs to take advantage of the design of headings and links.

Who are you writing for? What do people want to know? You need to know your AUDIENCE and your content’s PURPOSE.

A good opening identifies both these things. It calls to the people who you want to attract and it tells them what’s here for them, or what action they can take here.

So I picked a subject, physics, and went to 4 universities’ main pages for attracting new students. They each have a text block of some sort that opens the page. The audience has already found their way to the physics page, but might not have seen any other part of the site.

“I’m interested in studying physics at University. But that’s a pretty big decision. What university should I choose? And is physics the right major for me?”

This is the longest one.

It hardly mentions the university, or physics. It doesn’t mention studying physics. It works hard to explain who might be interested…but you’re only here if you’re already interested.

There’s no indication of the information or interaction that will follow if you read on.

Example 2 is shorter. It says more about studying physics than the last one, in many fewer words.
Hints at what you’ll learn, which is probably some of the information that people want.

Example 3 is short, and talks about the school and its teachers. It’s good on what sort of experience you might have if you enrol – again, part of the information people probably want.

#4 is another longer one, mainly about the department and what you learn. There’s good information (if you manage to read it all).

BUT none of them are particularly direct. They’re describing things to the reader, but not addressing the reader. The eventual interaction – ENROL, APPLY – isn’t there.

But it’s not about stuffing things down throats, either. Going back through them, here’s my attempt to distil the message.

The audience is identified by curiosity.
The purpose (hidden in the original) is to get people to want to study here.
Name-dropping Sir Ernest can’t hurt.

This is a subtler re-write, recasting the good description of physics to link it to the page’s purpose – getting people to enrol.

Put the reader in the action – rather than talking about ‘our students’, talk about becoming one. So long as the page design name the school clearly enough, you can even drop the word ‘physics’ completely.

Job one: reduce word count.

Drop the uni name – surely the site already has that taken care of.
Drop where we’re looking for planets (people already know what’s around the sun).
Simplify what’s left.
Reward people who read the whole thing with a bit of human touch at the end. (Remember, we’re trying to appeal to people, not give them their 1st lecture).

Remember that you’re writing for readers in task mode. Remember how much they (don’t) read, and the F-shape their eyeballs follow when they browse. Do what you can to help people find and understand the stuff they’re looking for.